Scar Flowers (17 page)

Angel said, “Theresa
asked about you. She asked if you were my girlfriend.”

Her eyes welled at the thought of anyone hurting him. “What’d you tell her?”

“That I wasn’t sure.”

Knowing Theresa, she would have had a fit when she heard that.

“Why aren’t you sure?” she asked.

“You know why.” His voice dropped to a whisper.

“Pretend I don’t.”

“Because you don’t let
me . . . because we don’t . . .” Would he say it?
You allow me only the slightest of lover’s priv-ileges, make me sleep at the foot of your bed. Ever since that first night, you haven’t let me be a man with you.
But all he said was, “I’m not your lover. Not all the way.”

Don’t you see I’m protecting you
, Angel? Protecting us?
Rationing how far they went, delaying boredom by denying consummation.
Except for that once, that first night.

Were Paul and Angel from separate sides of her life, or more alike than she had realized? She did not sleep with clients or desire them. Angel, her chosen boy, had her desire but could only hope to be her lover.

Faith was a different story. Best not to think of her now.

Those visiting gloves of Justine’s had had a smell
. Wrinkled, like a cellared apple—plump leather reminiscent of White Shoulders and the nutty spice of a cedar-lined closet. Tanned skin bitten with hundreds of tiny stitches. A cool, distant touch on her face, her arm, whenever Leah showed “excessive sentiment.” “That’s enough hysterics,” Justine would say. “A lady doesn’t slobber over getting something she likes.”

Hysterics. She’d been accused of that when she did not want to
do Justine’s bidding and tell her father that she had had her first period. “You’re a woman now. He should know, and you should be the one to tell him.” Her father, who spoke to her only to ask her advice on how to run the house. But Leah finally conceded. Unable to speak, she showed him a pair of her stained panties one night as he read the paper. He grunted something gruff at her, and she retreated to her bedroom, molten with shame.

Justine’s tactics were crude but effective. Paul especially loved to be made the instrument of his own humiliation. The
figur-ative stained panties had their uses.

“You don’t have to do this,” Leah said to Angel. Did she mean that he did not have to kneel or that he did not have to stay here? She drew him to his feet.

Normally she allowed him only training sessions: how to approach her, how to kiss her hands or her feet. On rare occasions, how to use his mouth to please her. She choreographed each move, awarded him advances that led only to a repeat of the entire routine. Which did she despise more now, her arrogance or his obedience?

“We’re both tired. We can talk in the morning.” She led Angel upstairs to her
room, where Sasha lay on the carpet gnawing a rawhide bone, and slid between the sheets after removing only her shoes. He started for his usual pallet on the floor across from the dog’s bed, until she said, “No. Up here, next to me.”

How would she sleep? Bursts of blue and red flashed against her eyelids where she rubbed them
. She had used him. Was using him. Just like she used Paul.

She thought of Simon’s work.
The main emotions he explored, the rhythms of the storytelling, carried the flavor of his inner life. A taste she had not savored fully in her midnight visits to his trailer.

Angel touched her shoulder, and Leah managed not to start in surprise. If she had, he would know she had forgotten he was there.

“Who’s Simon?” he asked.

Could he hear her thoughts?

Their first night together, Angel reached for her hand in his sleep as she started to slip out of bed. As if he knew she were leav-ing his room to return to her own, to avoid waking up with him in the morning. It had taken a quarter of an hour to work free without rousing him.

“No one,” she said. “He’s no one.”

Friday, June 9,
9:12 a.m.

S
he dreamed that Faith had followed her to L.A., saying she missed her, but it was really to sleep with Simon, and halfway through it all Leah
was
Simon. How powerful it felt to wear his body, to have that physical strength and those worlds of creativity to draw on. How docile Faith was in her arms.

In reality, Simon would be back at work on the film, and Gunnar would have hired a new fight choreographer. Gunnar, who had been easy to hypnotize, so eager was he for that rocky day to go smoothly, for a stuntwoman—
any stuntwoman—to appear on time and prepared. What was a small matter of unions and rules if that woman, Nadia, had done stunt work on other films?

She stretched. Sasha lay on the covers beside her, thumped her tail on the mattress when her mistress woke.
Leah stroked the dog’s coarse, thick fur.

Before descending the spiral staircase to the living room, Leah
changed into her green kimono patterned with gardenias. On the lake side of the house, an atrium provided the illusion that the room was open to the elements. Its glass walls straddled a black marble koi pond, half of which was in the living room and half outside on the deck, so that the fish could cruise underneath. She knelt and wiggled her fingers in the water to attract her favorite, a large
asagi
with crimson cheeks. Sunlight glanced off the water and shimmered in bright patches on the walls, which were covered in abstract murals of giant tulip leaves and stylized Japanese tsunami waves.

Sasha leaned her hip against her mistress’s knee, begging to have her ears rubbed. The sound of the lake washed through the room as Leah let the dog out into the yard and tossed a ball for her. When she closed the door, the house crouched in silence, the shoulder-high glass sculpture-vases full of murky water and brown-edged lilies. Dust coated the windowsills.

Faith seemed rarely to consider consequences—which allowed her to be a fearless submissive but made reading her motives nearly impossible. Did the girl neglect the house to punish Leah, to ensure herself of an eventual punishment, or to proclaim herself irresponsible? Or had she missed Leah, been depressed?

Not too depressed to sleep with Drew—in
our
bed . . .

“I know what you really are.”
She was still in junior high school when she learned her choices were hapless virgin, outcast whore, or black widow spider—a lady of the gloves-and-hat variety, lethal.

Or,
in my case, red widow spider. Allowing her victims to live, keeping them just for a short while.

Leah entered the kitchen, boiled water
, and listened for signs of life. Had Angel gone down to his room? The clank of metal, as of tools in a box, came from the library. He was probably fixing the creaking hinge. When she had awakened, she had been so glad to have time to savor her dream in solitude that she had not thought about his absence. He had not asked her to explain her dark mood last night, had not asked for anything more than to sleep in the same room with her.

As she set a pot of green tea on the counter to steep, Faith, hugging her slippers against her chest, shuffled up the stairs from her basement room, dresse
d in a bikini top and a pair of sweatpants rolled down over an elastic cord around her hips—one of Leah’s old pairs she had once worn over tights for ballet practice. The girl settled on a stool at the counter, cupped a mug in her hands. A bowl of onions and garlic, dented with age, shed fragments of parchment skin. Wisps of steam spiraled from the kettle.

Faith rinsed out her mug in the sink. As she turned to leave, Leah said
, “I’m ready to leave last night behind us if you are.”

Without turning around, the girl nodded.

“Good. You have chores. You can start by dusting the photographs outside the library.”

Leah gave the girl five minutes and then went to stand behind a glass sculpture in the living room, where she could watch unobserved. Faith had found Angel
already, of course. Dusting the photographs put her mere feet from him. She giggled and stared. He paused for a moment, then resumed work on the library door.

Just like the time Leah caught Faith outside Angel’s room downstairs, in the middle of the night. Just like the time the girl came home early from class on a day he was alone in the house.

Some things were still just as she had left them.

Simon thinks he
knows what I am? He has no idea.

“
Faith.” Leah set down her cup. The girl looked up, the picture of innocence.

Such relief, to feel sure of herself again. But maybe it was the ghost of her dream, the sensation of power that came from wearing Simon’s body.

“Faith. Come here.”

As the girl approached, light from the east window at her backlit her ear with a red glow but left her face in darkness. Pale shadows trailed from the coffee table. Leah touched the girl’s ear, the downy surface that covered the brittle structure underneath.

“Just like a little seashell,” she murmured, then in a sharper tone: “What were you doing, Faith? Flirting?”

The girl flinched, color rising, and Leah tightened her hold a fraction. With the right grip, one could use a knuckle to punch the dish of the ear inside-out with a twist and a pull. The cartilage would snap, and the flesh rip free. So vulnerable, the body’s deli
-cate jewelry. Leah smiled and gave Faith’s ear a slight pinch before releasing her. She suddenly craved to torment Faith with pleasure—pleasure the girl did not want to admit. Coaxed out in front of Angel.

“You’re overdue for a session.” Faith stared at the carpet, hands clasped behind her back. “You’re not to flirt with Angel,” said Leah. “I’ll give you what you want. And Faith—this is not about yesterday. If a session ever feels like retribution, use your safeword and I’ll stop.” The girl glanced at her sidelong, flickered a smile. Good
. They understood each other.

Leah turned to the boy. “
Angel, if you want to be excused, wait for me in your room. We’ll spend time together later. Just us.”

He took Leah’s hand and set it on the chain around his neck, warm from his skin. The weight of her fingers on it was enough to make him kneel, and as she let go
, he pressed her palm to his lips.

“Clever boy. But that’s not enough to distract me. G
et a glass of ice from the kitchen, and a towel, and come right back.”

Why did Simon judge her when their work was so similar
? They both balanced needs and feelings for each person in a scene, and applied just enough structure to raw passion to make it art and not self-indulgence.

The girl would be wondering what awaited her, why Leah wanted the things she
asked Angel to bring. Leah did not know why yet herself, but requesting them would invade the girl’s mind with questions. When Leah told Faith to strip, the girl hesitated, then removed her clothes and kicked them aside.

“Eyes up, Angel. She wants you to look at her.” Leah led them
upstairs to the velvet room off the gallery, with its soft crimson walls and floor, where she sent Faith to stand in the corner and directed the boy to set out the necessary things. She would have him watch, though he claimed that he hated to see women suffer torment.

Outside the velvet room
, Leah took a moment to study the gallery mural. The androgynous figure in the center foreground, which was bisected by the hidden door to her bedroom, dangled upside down by one ankle, its free leg crossed over one knee. The half of its body on the door was female, the half on the wall next to it male—the Hanged Man of the Tarot, with a twist. It embodied a precarious balance over the animal mind. The male half was slightly larger, so Angel thought of the being as male when he painted it, but this was a male with a strong feminine side, unrecognized by his conscious self: the figure had its eyes closed, oblivious that its two halves came from both sexes.

H
ow much did Angel keep secret, even from himself?

He had told her his story the first night he came to her house
. That as a child his little brother died of a rare skin disease that slowly hardened his body from the outside in, and after that, his parents shut themselves away in separate rooms, leaving Angel in the care of his sister Theresa. That in the family’s silent house, the adults drifted in and out like ghosts while his sister raised him. That Theresa had slapped his face when Angel had said he wished he had been the one who had died.

Angel’s self-portrait in the mural was a devil with four arms who watched a
boy transform into a tree. The child had been running, caught in mid-stride. Bark crept up from his feet to bind his legs and encase his ribs. One side of the devil’s face wept, its hands rending its own flesh in grief. The other side grinned as it sharpened an axe.

When the boy finished readying the instruments, Leah entered the velvet room. She fastened Faith’s hands behind her back with leather wrist cuffs and a spring-loaded clip, then led her to the velvet divan, next to a tray laid out with metal clamps,
latex gloves, a scalpel, surgical alcohol, a threaded needle, a bowl of lubricant, and the glass of ice. Faith’s head tipped forward to look. When Leah ran one fingernail lightly over the decorative scars on Faith’s back, the girl jumped, her spine tense as a spring.